The Rise of the "Authentic Self"

and why it is compelling to so many

adults sitting in a circle of chairs

“What would you do to ensure students can be their authentic selves on campus?” a parent recently asked one of the Head of School candidates at my children’s independent school.

Sure, it’s a trendy question, but it’s also very odd in human cultural history. (For the sake of this essay going smoothly, I will ignore the possibility that this phrase only comes from the mouths of upper-middle-class elites and the rich).

This parent’s question is odd because the origin of modern schooling is the enforcement of disciplined conformity and the absorption of canonical knowledge sets. The origin of contemporary education in America was Bible teaching. Our oldest “college,” Harvard, was originally a theological seminary. I studied the Puritans intensely in high school and then again in graduate school. These world-negating Calvinists were communalist, ideologically fatalistic, and had no use for a concept such as the “authentic self.” Colonial America is not the source of this idea.

Modern schools and offices organize themselves to induce conformity and accomplish complex work. Some are horrible at what they purport to do, but authentic self-expression is not their primary organizing principle. Frederick Taylor, the late 19th-century ‘father’ of early management theory, looked at factory workers as tools requiring systemic surveillance and control by disciplined plant managers. Peter Drucker built on this work after World War II as white-collar administrative bureaucracies grew in size and complexity (resting on top of large manufacturing ecosystems). He aimed to train modern desk managers to be efficient in a high-growth economy the world had never before experienced. He was also an early proponent of professional managers developing deep self-awareness and a long arc of professional development during their careers (the beginnings of ‘promotability’).

Aside from the fully retired, Americans spend nearly half of their waking hours in either school or work (see the American Time Use Survey for more details). These bureaucratized social domains are set apart dramatically from our informal, screen-heavy ‘personal’ leisure lives. The behavioral gulf between our leisure selves and our work/school selves could not be more extreme. We’ve forgotten about this because most of us dance between the two worlds daily. It just seems natural to us.

But, historically, it’s very new in human cultures.

Boosting individual self-expression at work or in the office, especially authentic self-expression, is not only a new, 21st-century goal, but it is also a solution whose problem we’ve completely forgotten to explore.

“Authentic Self" Defined

Here’s a great definition from a P1 (page 1) Google-indexed site (for the phrase “authentic self”) -

Being authentic helps us to be true to ourselves and trust our own choices. Authentic people don’t let themselves be influenced by others, they follow their own path and are aware of what they want or don’t want. But, as always, that’s easier said than done. ¹

I’ve read this paragraph about ten times just to soak it in. Honestly, it reads like a hymn to personal autonomy. The last part is a bit ominous. Is this quest for the authentic self doomed from the start?

At one level, the definition above is excellent advice in the kind of society we currently live in. If you allow yourself to be buffeted around by your peers, your Instagram feed, and marketing messages, you may be living someone else’s vision for your life without realizing it. If you have overbearing parents, they could also be smothering your authentic self by Zoom or SMS, making it hard for you to adapt to a rapidly changing urban life independently.

On the other hand, the belief in an “authentic self” also reinforces our primal conceit as Americans —that individuals should make big life decisions by tapping into their inner core instead of conferencing with (or following the lead of) the community - with those who possess far more wisdom about the big choices we encounter in life (e.g., career, dating, etc.).

In one of the top backlinked books for the search phrase “authentic self,” the author explores the new therapeutic method (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy) in therapy circles. In this method, patients learn to push past the “inhibitory emotions” of shame, guilt, and anxiety to fully experience their core emotions (anger, sadness, fear, doubt, etc.). The goal is master one’s emotions through direct awareness of them unfiltered by social inhibitions (most therapists agree on this objective).

It doesn’t take a PhD to see that the dichotomy between “core emotions” and “inhibitory emotions” seems to line up well with the dichotomy between the personal and the social.

The subtext of this author’s work is that we must be free of the socially inhibiting emotions that constrain our valid emotional expression. When we do this, we can better know our true feelings consciously, control them, and work through them. Traditional human societies use guilt, shame, or anxiety to do this emotional work on our behalf. The individual is not meant to be steering their emotions independently. If we repress our feelings due to social inhibitions, in the modern world, we can not understand and change our behavior patterns as autonomous actors. We become products of social collisions and interactions and not masterful, skillful agents. I’m oversimplifying this summary to get you to think about something later.

An Absurdly Brief Linguistic History of “Authentic Self” Talk

The phrase older folks (50+) are more familiar with than “authentic self” is “true self.” And there’s a reason for this. The phrase “true self” took off in printed English in the late 19th century as industrialization exploded across the globe. It also coincides with the development of modern clinical psychology and its implied, silent handling of human adaptation to urban life.

In the late 19th century, entire countries plunged young families into industrial “city life.” Wages in return for endless farm work. In the United States, we generated an embarrassing amount of urban immigrant squalor and general poverty that compounded urban life's perceived danger and chaos. Many forget that the “American city” in 1900 was far more sketchy, criminal, and dangerous to a lone outsider than it is today. It has taken us a century to learn how to manage modern cities suffused as they are with high levels of transiency and social inequity. And we’re still learning!

When we look at the rise of the phrase “authentic self,” we see how it correlates beautifully with the rise of 1960s counterculture. A chunk of the New Age movement focused on this concept, using a blend of Buddhist meditation, yoga, and other mind-centering techniques to push past our surface-level emotions and inhibitions to ‘unlock’ some true core self. For many, there was a hidden desire to create, more than ‘find,’ a new self full of new assumptions and lifestyle orientations and heavily delinked from one’s parents and elders. The link between finding and creating is very murky here, as with human memory.

For most of human history, though, there has been no need for “true selves” or “authentic selves.” None whatsoever.

And now for a brief pause in this week’s essay -

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New Podcast Appearance!

I had a very energetic chat with Meredith Edwards’ popular show recently.

• If it’s Oct 5th or 6th, please Subscribe to Meredith’s show on YouTube and be the first to watch our conversation on Monday morning!

• If it’s Oct. 7th or later, live links are HERE -

We covered the impact individualism has on our work, mental health, friendships & romantic relationships:

👉The playground of autonomy

👉How he navigates the pull towards individualism as a person with Asperger's

👉The prison of privacy

👉The optimism that drives us to bankruptcy

👉Friends as recreation vs interdependence

More podcast appearances are coming out in October and November! I am archiving them all on my Institute home page…for easy entertainment…

Now, back to your regularly scheduled essay…

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Putting Our Authentic Selves in Sociological Context

The need to know ourselves more profoundly is the outcome of industrial urban life, its assault on family and clan, and its deprioritization of deep relationships for our basic sustenance. You alone are the individually responsible architect of your life, curating a social network of your choosing to serve your needs and desires. Our physical lives do not depend on most people we know and love. Instead, our lives rely on third-party bureaucracies and complex social coordination among total strangers in exchange for cash. The current relief effort in Asheville, North Carolina, is an impressive example. The death toll in North Carolina would probably be in the tens of thousands already due to lack of clean water, were it not for FEMA, state government disaster plans, modern supply chains, modern roadways, and transport vehicles.

Notice that we moderns quickly submit our “authentic selves” to relief agencies, government relief systems, and FEMA in disasters. We have no other way to deal with the situation since we are no longer a nation of homesteaders. We must submit to impersonal systems because our immediate social networks are no longer set up to ensure survival. Our social networks are me-centered webs of exchange that rest on top of mostly guaranteed survival.

I suspect humans are the least anxious in moments of disaster and crisis because our concern with our interior ‘self’ turns off more or less. We enter a flow state of sorts. It may be stressful and exhausting, but daily life is extraordinarily clear when in crisis. Notice how much easier it is for everyone to overlook petty differences during relief efforts (especially when they are well organized).

In everyday life, though, American society offers an enormous scope of leisure-focused autonomy. In the last half-century, the pace of social change and intra-generational changes in morality, acceptable sexual behavior, workplace norms, and family life have been bewildering to more than a few of us. There is so much lifestyle variation that we can’t keep up with it all.

In societies like ours, making a poor assumption or judgment about a stranger is now extremely easy because we interact frequently with people we never really get to know. How many of your colleagues do you really know in a well-rounded way?. This shallow network dependence only increases the surface area for poor interpersonal judgments and behavior. We increasingly find it easy to stumble because of how modern life throws us constantly in front of strangers and weak ties.

Social competence or social fitness is related to our need to know our authentic selves and true emotional states - to master ourselves.

The Real Origin of a Need for an “Authentic Self”

If the concept of the “authentic self” has any value, it is because it ties to a generalized, modern need for intense self-awareness in a lifestyle-diverse society. Self-awareness allows us to surveil our triggered emotions in real-time, carefully filter them, and manage them deftly. Without this skill, individuals who rely purely on shame, guilt, or anxiety to control their behavior will flail around madly in a fragmented lifestyle-based society like ours. They will express emotions inappropriately or repress them inappropriately. They will suffer lots of relationship problems.

Social scientists tend to view emotions as interpretations of social experience. Emotions do not arise in a social vacuum, we say. Emotions are critical coordination tools for social life, social cohesion, and interpersonal communication. However, historically, society provided stringent rules and inhibitions such that the community did most of the emotional control work for you. This took place in the form of rituals. You were told when to express and repress based on local needs that did not change much in your lifetime. Individuals did not need much self-control because they lived with carefully set-out guard rails. Society exerted control on your behalf (even if you chafed against it).

The modern need to become highly self-aware is about executive functioning in a society that drowns you in lifestyle choices you never asked for. You will be seriously confused if you do not form an inner executive compass. Your gift of autonomy will become an unwitting submission to peer-based and media messages. You will ping-pong around in your twenties, chasing mirages of happiness.

The rise of the new cultural quest for an “authentic self” is about more than becoming highly self-aware, self-controlled individuals (or good little Victorians!) That’s the incidental, positive outcome for a 21st-century world in which your parents and family can not necessarily give you much meaningful street advice on careers, dating, friendship, or leisure activities. And a society where you will quickly encounter all sorts of different lifestyles without any warning.

I think the movement to fine-tune one’s ‘authentic self’ is also about resolving a massive conflict between the degree of personal autonomy Americans experience outside of work and the limited autonomy any American workplace can ever give anyone.

Most offices operate with some degree of bureaucratic organization and control once more than four or five people are involved. Sure, it could be a sloppy bureaucracy, but there is no real free reign in an office (unless you’re the owner).

The more you chase lifestyle autonomy outside of work, the more work itself will annoy you at a deep, unconscious level. In fact, the gap between autonomy at home and autonomy at work has never been more extreme than in modern America, where families with kids at home are a minority of the residential make-up.

The more we aspire to an authentic self, the more this gap bothers us, and the more having children threatens to suffocate us with obligations. The latter perception can only occur when the culture’s baseline expectation is high personal freedom.

The modern desire to express an “authentic self” at work strikes me as a quiet civil rights movement for the self inside highly bureaucratized, low autonomy environments.

I’m not yet convinced this is a very adaptive behavior. I think it’s a cry of confusion, most likely due to unresolved inner conflict in a culture that overhypes the merits of unrestricted social choice.

I was a classic example of this, a PhD refugee from academia trying to fit into a corporate work environment driven by client satisfaction. I was frustrated at the autonomy I had lost at work because work was no longer mostly about… me.

1. https://openup.com/self-guided-care/blog/a-psychologists-guide-to-being-your-authentic-self/